Books
You Wouldn't Believe It
A review of Bullet Park by John Cheever. There are people who believe that when writers pass middle age their imaginative power—like their sexual energy—tends to diminish. If they are good writers, the argument runs, they have learned their craft by this time, and so their later books have a carefully disciplined, if comparatively lifeless, quality. READ MORE >>
A Sort of Moby Dick
A review of Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. READ MORE >>
Government and the Corporations
The New Industrial State by John K. Galbraith (Houghton Mifflin; $6.95) READ MORE >>
Reporting on Cuba
Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel by Lee Lockwood (Macmillan, $10) Inconsolable Memories by Edmund Desnoes (New American Library; $4.50) READ MORE >>
China: Is History Repeating Itself?
When news from China is totally unforeseen and utterly confusing, your experienced Chi-spert (“China expert”), nothing daunted, falls back on history. The historian’s type of after-the-fact explanation is both less courageous and less foolhardy than forecasting what will happen next. Today it offers several perspectives on Chairman Mao, all melancholy, which undoubtedly contribute to the current Chinese popular reaction to him. READ MORE >>
The Brilliant Mr. MacNeice
Mystical Militants
Biography and the Narrator
A review of The Art of Biography by Paul Murray Kendall READ MORE >>
Criminalizing Homosexuality
On January 8,1962, a state grand jury in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, handed down an indictment charging two men—call them Defendants A and B—with having committed a homosexual act, more specifically, fellatio. Defendant A pleaded no contest, received a five-year sentence and served a portion of it. Defendant B pleaded not guilty, was tried by a jury, and was sentenced to serve not less than 20 or more than 30 years in jail. The sentences were handed down by the same judge. READ MORE >>
